Global AIDS Week-A personal view
By Jean Su
Monday,
December 1, 2003
 It
is Global AIDS Week, and the concern of five Princeton student-activists
is not whether the school will crack down on sudden AIDS protests
or whether crowd-control will be needed at the keynote speech.
Quite the opposite, actually. In planning the events for the
week, our greatest consideration was whether our events will
have a sizable audience, one that won't belittle the speakers.
This concern reflects what happened last year when a panel
of PHARMA's big shots debated in a lecture hall with only
five seats filled.
This is Princeton University, the top institution of higher
education in the United States, according to the experts and
endowment-measurers of U.S. News and World Report. What has
made my experience here worthy of such a title is a seminar
I took as a first-year about the political implications and
solutions to the AIDS epidemic. J.M. Spectar convinced eleven
well-to-do adolescents that knowledge is just as powerful
a weapon as drugs or prevention programs, that people need
to know before they can act. What has disappointed me in my
three years here is how people have interpreted the act of
connaitre as one of the mind and not of the heart. We are
bogged down by rationality and complacency. While Brown students
riled in response to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the
Princeton campus remained as placid as ever. Murmurs were
made about the Iraq War, with barely anyone taking a strong
stance in any direction. Those who did were proclaimed political
heretics and were dismissed just as quickly. We are supposed
to be tomorrow's leaders, but national crises do not seem
to shake a stagnant student body.
Today we are facing the world's crisis of HIV/AIDS, as we
were last year and the decade before. Yet the comprehension
of the issues at hand, I dare say, is in the reach of only
a few Princeton students, then and now. I have taken to heart
the words of my previous professor and believe that the dissemination
of information is a slow process, but it must be done with
determination, vigor, and a true concern for the lives at
risk. Spreading this virus of knowledge, in the words of Spectar,
is the mission of this week.
But this is not an easy task, and I believe this is so because
of the nature of the epidemic. Yes, distance from Sub-Saharan
Africa and now India, China, and Russia makes U.S. citizens
believe the disease cannot touch them. But I think another
reason for apathy stems from how the disease is presented
through the media and activists. To shock you, glaring statistics
are thrown out, the classic being that every minute five people
die of AIDS. Before this freshman class, I had become numb
to the black and white pictures of starving children. What
does not reach most ears-and what needs to-is how we can address
the epidemic, how we as citizens can affect change. What success
stories exist, what the Global Fund is accomplishing. How
the disease spreads and why these reasons cannot be ignorantly
labeled under a racist monomer. Most importantly, people need
to know the exact figures that can effectively fund the gradual
mitigation of the disease. The epidemic has been blown into
what seems an undefeatable monster. But according to Jeffrey
Sachs, it is a monster that can be beat. And effectively so.
The breakdown of what this disease is all about is what the
five of us at Princeton hope to disseminate to our peers this
week. Hopefully with some luck and a lot of heart, we'll be
able to spread the knowledge. Only then can we expect some
action.
---
Jean Su is studying an A.B. degree in the Woodrow Wilson
School of Public and International Affairs at at PRINCETON
UNIVERSITY Princeton, NJ. Her coursework includes international
law, political and social conflict in Africa and China, American
constitutional law. She is expected to study in South Africa
in Spring 2004, and participate in policy task force focused
on improving nation's poverty level, water supply, and HIV/AIDS
situation.
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